Below Review

Hungry for a less hectic pace.

By Tj Hafer

I love the feeling I get when exploring a new level of Below's gloomy, foreboding dungeon for the first time. From the enemies to the environment art to the sound design, everything falls into place perfectly to create a spooky atmosphere of unveiling the unknown, never quite knowing what might lie down the next flight of stairs. Then I step on a cheap instakill spike trap, have to start over without my stuff, and likely need to spend the next 30 minutes farming lantern fuel and bat meat so I can take another crack at it. Talk about killing the mood.

Almost all of my biggest frustrations with Below come back to it not seeming able to decide if it wants to be a moody, deliberate dungeon crawler with satisfying combat or a punishing survival-action game that never lets you relax. It's at its best when it keeps that first goal in mind, wowing me with cool, subterranean vistas and enticing me with hard-to-find secret rooms full of useful rewards.

From the relatively serene, dewy caves where the journey starts all the way down to the hellish pits far underground that you really need to see for yourself, each set of levels has a strong identity that speaks to how far I’d come in the 30 or so hours I spent to reach the end. I particularly enjoyed the Necropolis section right around the middle, which is full of hungry ghouls and unsettling bone monoliths. I was spurred to delve down into further danger simply to understand what this place was and how it came to be this way. And that’s what a truly interesting dungeon should do.

I was spurred to delve down into further danger simply to understand what this place was and how it came to be this way.

But that second goal – never letting you off your toes – is often there to ruin the moment. There's no stronger example of this than the freaking hunger meter, which is among the most unnecessary ones I've ever encountered in a game. It’s effectively a ticking clock to starvation, and nothing takes me out of discovering a massive, ruined, underground city like a little red icon popping up to remind me I can't stop to enjoy the gorgeous architecture or meticulously comb every corner for secrets. Instead, once my limited inventory runs out of pre-prepared nourishing soups I need to forage some mushrooms quick or I risk losing everything. It's so counterproductive because even though many of these levels are procedurally generated they’re just begging to be enjoyed and mapped out at a methodical tempo. There's a hidden item shop with some really cool stuff in it, for example, that I completely missed on one of the upper levels my first few times through because the constant awareness of my limited supplies discouraged me from being thorough.

Feed Me

And with keeping yourself fed comes dull, repetitive busywork. Scooping food up off the ground as you go will get you only so far (much like in real life), and preparing for expeditions into the deeper levels of the dungeon where sustenance is scarce requires something like a half hour farming for supplies close to the surface by wailing on smaller enemies who present no real challenge to relieve them of lantern fuel and nutritious meat. That means that even though there’s a fairly robust system of unlockable shortcuts that helps you maintain some momentum between deaths, including the ability to spend resources to turn a campfire into a teleport point you can return to from any other campfire. Even if you don’t die, realizing you didn't bring enough food can send you back up several levels in search of nutrition anyway.

Melee combat with a sword or spear is fair, methodical, and exciting.

If it weren't for all this grinding, I think I would have been much more engaged by the relentlessly punishing difficulty of the lower floors. Melee combat with a sword or spear is fair, methodical, and exciting once you learn how the diverse and memorable collection of enemies behave. I never really got the hang of the bow, which has some fiddly timing to lining up its shots. There’s a gradual progression in monster difficulty that introduced new attack patterns and new dangers right when I felt ready to face them. And most enemies communicate through their appearance which part of them is dangerous, which is a nice way of giving some clues on how to fight them. Crazy, blade-wielding mummies in the Necropolis have quick and brutally painful attacks, but require a lot of downtime in between coming for your throat. Giant crab monsters in the ice area are very good at blocking your normal attacks, so you have to wait for them to wind up a strike of their own and take advantage of the window of vulnerability. Most of the time I was mixing it up with this cast of boogeymen, I was really enjoying myself.

There are also a couple challenging boss fights, but it’s just the same super enemy repeated multiple times. This felt like a missed opportunity, and I craved a greater variety of big bads to test my skills against. Especially given how tightly tuned the combat feels and how creative Below gets with its normal enemies, it’s quite a letdown to get to a new boss arena and realize it’s going to be just the same as the last one. On the bright side, there were a couple cool event battles, like battling a huge wave of ghouls while waiting for an elevator to activate, that served as memorable and momentous combat moments in their own right.

Some grueling gauntlets later on really got my blood pumping, too. The deepest parts of the dungeon have ways of keeping you moving and testing your reflexes. But even though I enjoy getting a little better and a little further each time, knowing I'd have to do so many chores just to earn another shot if I failed diminished that sense of satisfaction next to other, similar games. High stakes are all well and good, but not when the cost of losing is based so heavily on time-consuming activities that aren’t fun.

Dude, Where's My Lantern?

There's only one lantern in the entire world and you drop it if you die.

There's also the compounding issue of the lantern, which is needed to open many critical doors, can spot traps, and is the only defense against certain enemies. There's only one in the entire world and you drop it if you die, so if you happened to kick the bucket in an area full of shadow monsters who fear no other weapon you face the prospect of a far more difficult trek to get it back. It's such a strange reverse rubber-band mechanic: You weren't good enough to beat this room on your first shot, so now you have to do a version of it that's way harder! Good luck. To add insult to injury, dying a second time without retrieving the lantern makes it very difficult to find again. Mercifully, the minimap will still tell you what floor it’s on, but the indicator of which room you’re looking for shifts to where your freshest corpse is lying.

In the background there’s a story that, on the rare occasions that you can take a breath to absorb it, is really well done. Without using a word of dialogue, it slowly and effectively unveils the nature and secrets of the dungeon. The animations that take you between floors are as eye-catching as they are mood-setting, and entering a new floor that looks nothing like what came before was always a cool moment. And the ending is a dramatic, unexpected twist that almost makes the 30-ish hours of pain of getting there worth it.

The Verdict

I wanted to love Below for its amazing art, stellar sound design with echoing chambers and atmospheric music, and clever, inspired environmental storytelling. But their light isn’t bright enough to shine through all the darkness of the hunger, instant death, and corpse run mechanics, which actively get in the way of enjoying the world and the combat. Below simply leans too hard on roguelike and crafting elements, which create an urgent pace and conflict with its more admirable design ideas.